My galy charged wth forgetfulness..Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghtes doeth pas..Twene Rock and Rock and eke myne ennemy Alas..That is my lorde sterith wth cruelnes
And every owre a thought in redines..As tho that deth were light in suche a case..An endles wynd doeth tere the sayll apase..Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes
A rayn of teris a clowde of derk disdain..Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce..Wrethed wth error and eke wth ignoraunce
The starres be hid that led me to this pain..Drowned is reason that should me confort..And I remain despering of the port

I wanted to besure to reach you;though my ship was on the way it got caughtin some moorings. I am always tying upand then deciding to depart. In storms andat sunset, with the metallic coils of the tidearound my fathomless arms, I am unableto understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard aleewith my Polish rudderin my hand and the sun sinking. Toyou I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels wherethe wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. YetI trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoningof the eternal voices,the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Frank O'Hara: To theHarbormaster, 1954, from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957

What was Ashore, then?... Cargoed with Forget,
My ship runs down a midnight winter storm
Between whirlpool and rock, and my white love's form
Gleams at the wheel, her hair streams. When we met
Seaward, Thought frank & guilty to each oar set
Hands careless of port as of the waters' harm.
Endless a wet wind wears my sail, dark swarm
Endless of sighs and veering hopes, love's fret.
Rain of tears, real, mist of imagined scorn,
No rest accords the fraying shrouds, all thwart
Already with mistakes, foresight so short.
Muffled in capes of waves my clear signs, torn,
Hitherto most clear,—Loyalty and Art.
And I begin now to despair of port.

Beautiful indeed -- Wyatt's galley appearing here after "Ships in distress in a Raging Storm" like a beacon of light, "touchstone" (in more than a way to me), great recall of Creeley's sense of that penultimate line. And together with Petrarch in the Italian, and in translation (yours?) and Berryman's (which I've never seen) and "To the Harbormaster" (which must be O'Hara's homage to Wyatt, and all the Clement Marot "Visions of Petrarch" -- wow.

"Hail to thee, shipwrecked poets, drowned & gone!" indeed.

5.12

light coming into fog against invisibleridge, song sparrow calling from branchin foreground, wave sounding in channel

Thanks for being there, Steve. Without you, where would I get the courage.

Once spent a nocturnal "hour by the parlour clock" talking about this poem with RC. Wyatt like Campion had been school to him.

Frank's poem by the by is about Larry Rivers.

That literal English version of the Petrarch, at the bottom, evidently cobbled together for my teaching purposes back in the day, is something that turned up with the rest of the dusty closet scholar trove represented here.

Despite the beauty of this morning in the Hudson Valley, sunny and without a cloud in the sky, the peace only disturbed by the local policemen checking car registration and inspection stickers, poem-on-poem (including Steve's) and picture-on-picture, this completely matches my mood and is deeply affecting. Over the last couple of days, I've been looking at pictures of stormy seas, including some by Albert Pinkham Ryder. Occasions like this make me believe that things happen for a reason, although sometimes it's preferable to think that they don't. Curtis

The Dutch maritime masters, their observation of the sea, nothing quite like it -- this Backhuysen, so dynamic, dramatic in its use of chiaroscuro, and at the same time so carefully observed.

You've reminded me of a book I once ghosted, the life story of a fellow from Selma, Alabama whose promising career as a baseball pitcher had been curtailed by an arm injury, and who then learned to pitch all over again, more or less underhanded (extreme sidearm), started over at the low-minor-league bus-stop bottom level, worked his way up and had a brief period of unlikely success with the Mets, even appearing in a World Series.

He believed it had all worked out for him according to some larger plan, so I suggested we call the book Things Happen for a Reason.

But... and on the other hand...

The things that have been happening around here lately BETTER NOT have been happening for a reason.

Perhaps those hidden stars could tell the story... were the sky not clouded at the moment.

Only an hour or so ago, I was finishing the chapter in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall where Cromwell is awakened before dawn and told that "Tom Wyatt's been taken up." Immediately Cromwell thinks Thomas More is behind the action, but it turns out that Wyatt and his brat pack have spent New Year's Eve making riot in Westminster, smashing windows, leaping over bonfires and generally comporting themselves like poets under the influence.

Here you have given us another Wyatt, troubled still, but more in command of the situation.

"You've reminded me of a book I once ghosted, the life story of a fellow from Selma, Alabama whose promising career as a baseball pitcher had been curtailed by an arm injury, and who then learned to pitch all over again, more or less underhanded (extreme sidearm), started over at the low-minor-league bus-stop bottom level, worked his way up and had a brief period of unlikely success with the Mets, even appearing in a World Series."

At first I thought you were talking about No Big Deal, Tom, because the Bird started out a rookie-of-the-year pitcher and then contracted an arm injury. But he was from Massachusetts. (I grew up in Flint, MI. Mark Fidrych was a big hero around there.)

Tom -- Have continued to enjoy this all day and mentioned it to Caroline at dinner, who will read the post tomorrow. Everything about it immediately "saves" to the brain. We had one of those days where some of the usual confusion actually gave way to clarity because we made some concrete, if mundane, plans and were able to cross to-do items off our list. Breaking for a bit, we drove to a place in Warwick, NY, a pretty area, where they make excellent hard cider from the local apples and pears, a glory of Orange County, NY. We then had great ice cream cones at an elevated location where we could survey miles of the Hudson Valley from our perch. Still, Wyatt's poem and the others, as well as the pictures, stayed with me. Curtis

Well, Wyatt was given to what we might now call risk-taking behaviour. But then, his job as ambassador and spy was certainly at least as perilous as such things were in the Cold War scenes Le Carré imagined. And of course the job did mean sailing on those little matchbox boats as pictured in the illustrations from Clement Marot's Visions of Petrarch. The Patrick O'Brian period ships were ocean liners in comparison. I would guess the imagery in the Petrarch standard meant more to Wyatt than it had meant to Petrarch in the first place. For him, after all, Avignon was merely an overland journey.

David,

No, this was somebody whose arm injury had happened BEFORE I ghosted his life story.

Terry Leach.

(And oh, still so very sad about Mark.)

Curtis,

Thanks very much, and it is a pleasure to share that beautiful day vicariously, the elevated ice cream cones especially.

(Spent mine cowering under the covers. Still, as the optimist might say, no harm done.)

Creeley's talking/writing about Campion preceded by Pound's -- "Song writers: Herrick, Campion, Waller, Dorset, Rochester." (p. 79 in the ABC) is what sent me to Campion in the first place. I am happy to hear of your spending such "a nocturnal 'hour by the parlour clock."